About a week ago I was wondering about Multiverse, the one-size-fits-all platform on which developers can create their own virtual worlds. How were the first projects moving along? Would the beta open up this year as promised? What tools were necessary to develop content?

Turns out that things may be moving forward in fine fashion (you couldn’t really tell if you did a quick scan of the Multiverse public forum – at least I couldn’t tell).

So anyway, C|Net has a piece on the current state of Multiverse (Link) that’s worth reading for those interested in the platform. I very much like that Oregon forestation visualization project that’s discussed. In fact, it’s the variety that’s really of interest to me. Spice of life and all that.

Saw this coming. Authors are finally auctioning off naming rights to characters in their novels. It didn’t sound so bad when I emailed Stephen King the idea back in 2000. When I posted about it in January (reLink) it still sounded okay. Kind of. But now that it’s being done, it sounds so… crass . At least this time it’s for a worthwhile cause. Next time I don’t think it will be.

Imagine Tolstoy or Hemingway auctioning off naming rights. Imagine instead of “Frankenstein”, we got “Blaupunkt”. Instead of “Willy Loman” we got local furniture sales success story “Mark Stephens”.

Here’s a new prediction: authors, artists and musicians will get wealthy sponsors just like in olden times. The rich will get the good stuff (including live concerts, which will soon be so expensive the average person can’t attend) and the commoners will get sloppy seconds. Hooray for piracy and the selfish mindset it promotes; it’s the grease that’s helping these gears grind up our culture still further.

Aren’t we all proud of where this is leading us.

via Boing Boing

I suspect I’m not alone in saying this was bound to happen. From the Linden Lab blog (Link):

On September 6 we discovered evidence that an intruder was able to access the Second Life database through the web servers. The exploit was shut down on the afternoon of September 6 when we discovered it.

Detailed investigation over the last two days confirmed that some of the unencrypted customer information stored in the database was compromised, potentially including Second Life account names, real life names and contact information, along with encrypted account passwords and encrypted payment information.

No unencrypted credit card information is stored on the database in question. Unencrypted credit card information has not been compromised.

So much for anonymity. For anyone surfing the series of tubes, it’s largely a myth anyway. I just hope they didn’t get the plans for the Doomsday Device I was mocking up in SL.
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This isn’t exactly something I’ve been wanting to discuss but it’s come up on Jamais Cascio’s blog entry, “(Virtual) Weapon Smuggling” (Link): kirkyan weapons.

For those of you who don’t understand what that is, imagine you designed a weapon inside a 3D virtual world like Second Life. Imagine that data was sufficiently accurate that a real device could be fabricated using rapid-manufacturing technology (e.g. a metal laser-melting system). Let’s say that the fabbed device isn’t functioning as best it could, so the virtual version which is connected to the real version via a ubiquitous computing network – using sensors embedded in the fabbed version to record relevant information – redesigns itself using automated software routines. The owner puts the weapon in a recycle unit where any number of processes break the weapon down into its core materials, and then those materials are used in the re-fabrication of a superior, custom replacement weapon based on the new virtual version of that weapon.
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This one I had to find. After noticing a nice screenshot from Atari’s Test Drive: Unlimited game, I read a couple of paragraphs of the accompanying Next Gen story (Link). I didn’t get further than this line:

Revenues will be supported by downloadable content via Xbox Live.

I’d wondered off and on what was going on with XBox Live’s Marketplace. If you recall, when Microsoft announced it I was more than a little enthusiastic (reLink); and for good reason I thought (reLink). However, I’m not a console person so I had to rely on what I found online to get a sense of how it was going. And most of what I was hearing was that the Marketplace was being used by developers – not by independents freelancers. That wasn’t what I was hoping to hear. It just meant that developers were off hiring people to make add-on content and then taking a major chunk of the profit. I’d prefer the money go straight to the creator (minus MS’s cut, of course).
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